


Home Is

by Pargoletta



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Animal Smuggling, Building a Life, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Finance, Homesickness, Human Trafficking, M/M, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26200882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pargoletta/pseuds/Pargoletta
Summary: In the weeks after she joins the team, Nile still has a lot to learn about the reality of an immortal life.  Seeing Nicky endure a bout of deep despair spurs her on to learn how to construct a real life for herself within her new limitations.  And in building a life for herself, Nile might just be able to save her new family as well.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Celeste, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 100
Kudos: 360





	1. Where You Hang Your Hat

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to this story! For some reason, I’m kind of fascinated by trying to figure out the ordinary lives of extraordinary characters. What would immortal jet-setting mercenaries _do_ all day? Where do they go when they’re not meeting up at hotels in Morocco, flying on cargo planes with drug smugglers, or hanging out at dilapidated safe houses in French ghost towns? How do you settle down between jobs, find a place to live, go to the grocery store, and chat with the neighbors, when at any minute, you can be called halfway around the world to be betrayed and kidnapped by pharma bros?
> 
> Fortunately, movies are sensible enough not to answer questions like that. This makes for a much more entertaining movie, and it also makes room for people like me . . . Enjoy this, and I’ll meet you at the end!

  1. **Where You Hang Your Hat**



Centuries later, when the new one asked her how she had come up with the whole plan, Nile had to think about it for a while, to untangle the strands of memory. Eventually, she decided on the afternoon several days after a tangle with Chinese drug smugglers in New York. They had gone to a safe house on Cape Ann to rest from the job and wait for Copley to cover their tracks. By that time, Nile had grown accustomed to the shabby, haphazard safe houses scattered around Europe, and was surprised to see that the Cape Ann safe house was bright, clean, and spacious, perched on the water, the property ringed with beach roses.

Nicky was in the kitchen, boiling and pressing fruit for what he claimed would be a delicious drink later in the week. He seemed content with his work, so Nile didn’t worry about him. Joe had claimed the dining table and had covered it with documents and his laptop, which he occasionally swore at while doing something complicated involving online finance. Nile did wonder about him a little bit, but reasoned that, since Nicky didn’t seem worried, she would wait to worry until he did.

And, really, it was Joe’s own problem that he had chosen to spend the day indoors yelling at foreign banks. Nile knew an opportunity for serious downtime when she saw it, and was perfectly happy to spend an afternoon sprawled on the back deck in a lounger, wearing a tiny yellow bikini and sunglasses, and talking about life with Andy, who lay in her own lounger, wearing her own bikini and sunglasses. Nicky’s fruit concoction wouldn’t be ready for at least another day, and they had helped themselves to beers from the drinks refrigerator in the meantime. The warmth of the sun and the fresh sea breeze caressed them, and they listened to the waves break on the rocks nearby. Idly, Nile turned her head to watch a guided tour boat motoring slowly past, hugging the coastline. She could almost hear the squawk of the PA system on the boat.

“What do you think they’re saying?” she asked Andy.

Andy listened for a moment before she answered. “They’re probably explaining how this is the area where all the rich people are.”

That made sense. Their safe house was located in a neighborhood of ostentatiously simple seaside homes and was part of a small, almost unbearably picturesque town full of wealthy artists. Nile had heard the word “twee” before, but hadn’t really understood it until she had walked into one of the downtown shops in search of a few new shirts. She was enjoying herself thoroughly, and deliberately.

“So we’re living it up with the richies?” she said, a smile creeping over her face.

“Mostly. Some of these places are vacation rentals, but a lot of them are people’s summer homes. That’s how we can be safe here. They expect people to come and go.”

Nile took another swig of her beer. “Now that we’ve come, let’s not go for a while.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Andy dozed off in the sunshine, and Nile let herself drift for a while as well.

The group relaxed enough over a dinner of delivery pizza and several bottles of good red wine that Nile finally felt comfortable teasing Joe about his epic battle with the banks. “Some of us know what the ‘vacation’ in ‘vacation home’ means,” she told him.

Joe laughed, and rescued an olive that had started to slide off of his slice of pizza. “Oh, I intend to relax,” he said, and aimed a smoldering look at Nicky that was so over the top that Nile realized that he had done it mostly to tease her back. Nicky snorted into his wine, and Andy lobbed a piece of green pepper in Joe’s general direction. Satisfied, Joe took another bite of pizza. “But seriously,” he said. “Most of that financial work will involve you, so we should sit down together soon and discuss it.”

Nile groaned. “Later. Not while it’s so nice.”

“It’ll keep for a bit,” Joe agreed. “Tomorrow’s supposed to be bikini weather again.”

“Or canoeing weather,” Nicky suggested.

“Canoeing in bikinis,” Andy amended.

Nile rolled her eyes and helped herself to another slice of pepperoni.

The next day was beautiful, as Joe had predicted, but the day after dawned gloomy and wet. Joe and Nile left Nicky and Andy curled up on couches with novels, and Joe introduced Nile to the surprisingly complicated world of immortal finance. Each of them seemed to have several different accounts, many held anonymously at Swiss banks, and there were more group accounts buried deep in the layers of several fictitious holding companies.

“That’s a lot of misdirection,” Nile observed, and Joe nodded.

“You don’t want to see what happens when Barclays figures out that an account’s been active since it was founded.”

Nile looked the date up on her phone – 1690. Okay, Joe had a point there.

He showed her a series of account pages and financial spreadsheets, and she gave a low whistle at the size of the accounts. “That’s a lot of money there. That’s, like, Jeff Bezos money. Or Bill Gates.”

Joe grinned. “The twin miracles of compound interest and a couple of lucky investments. Anyway, the thing I’ve been working on is making sure that enough of the group assets are liquid so that we can set up a few accounts for you.”

“Me?” Nile blinked. “I already have an account. Fifth Third Bank in Chicago.”

“Not for long,” Joe said. “Copley put your KIA papers through, and your family will have to close that account. Don’t worry, I had him double-check. You put your brother down as beneficiary, so he’ll get the money and any residuals from your service.”

“It’s not much, but it’s something.” Her brother had been saving up for DePaul, and Nile hoped that her money might help, at least a little.

Joe smiled at her. “You’re a good sister,” he said. “You look out for your family, and your other family will look out for you.”

It turned out that there was only so much that they could do online, from Cape Ann, but it was easy enough to grant Nile access to two of the group accounts and to set up what Nile privately thought of as Baby’s First Mutual Fund. By the time Nicky wandered in, soft and sleepy from a nap, Nile had control of more money than her mother had ever made in her life, and her head spun just thinking about it.

Nicky leaned over the back of Joe’s chair and draped himself over Joe from behind. He pressed a kiss into the crook of Joe’s neck and blinked owlishly at Nile. “It’s a lot to handle at once,” he said. “But it looks like you’ve been doing pretty well in here.”

Joe pulled on Nicky’s arms. “It’s been better than pretty good. Nile picked this up right away.”

“Mmm. That’s good.” Nicky glanced at Nile. “Booker and Joe used to do the accounts together. If you got through that much in just a few hours . . .”

Nile blew out a breath and thought about that. She hadn’t ever thought of herself as being suited to high finance, but maybe that was just because she’d never been around serious money. “I could learn to do this,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got time.”

“And the head for it.” Joe reached up and rubbed Nicky’s hair. “This one has tried many times, but his talents lie elsewhere.”

“I peaked in the fourteenth century,” Nicky explained happily. “I was back in Genoa for a while, and I learned double-entry bookkeeping. It may have been a descendant of my infant niece who taught it to me.”

“The one who kept the _Messari_ accounts?” Joe asked.

“His son, I think.”

Nile considered this for half a minute, and then she could have sworn that she actually felt her brain snap. High finance was one thing, but _deep_ finance was something else entirely. “Okay,” she said. “I think I need to go lie down about this now.”

Joe chuckled, and Nicky snuggled a little closer into the crook of his neck. “I warmed up the couch upstairs just for you,” he said.

Nile actually went up to her bedroom and settled into the chaise longue there. She tried to nap, but her racing thoughts wouldn’t allow it. Joe had promised to take her to Switzerland very soon so that she could set up her very own numbered Swiss bank account – and how crazy was it that she, Nile Freeman, would soon own a numbered Swiss bank account, like some swanky villain in the old black-and-white movies that her mother had watched while she did the ironing when Nile and her brother were little?

In the meantime, she had access to far more money than all of them together could ever spend in . . . she had almost thought “a lifetime,” but that didn’t really apply any more, so she settled on “a very long time.” There was a steady income as well, mostly from investments but also, as it happened, from some old rental properties that Nile suspected that at least Andy and Nicky had completely forgotten about. Four years’ tuition at DePaul wouldn’t even make a dent in that amount. Even if her brother decided to go to law school or something like that, somewhere pricey like Harvard or Yale, the group investments would make that money back in only a few years.

Really, it seemed as though the hardest part would be hiding the source of her brother’s “sudden windfall” scholarships. Nile had never been particularly interested in finance before, but here was the perfect opportunity to learn something completely new to her. Joe needed an assistant, and Nile needed someone to teach her how to take care of her family from beyond the grave. She was sure that they could work something out.

She finally did fall asleep on the chaise longue, and dreamed of money and college degrees until Andy came to wake her for dinner.

Several days later, Nile reluctantly packed her bags. Their stay on Cape Ann had been amazing, culminating in an evening spent at a waterside lobster shack where Andy taught Nile how to disassemble a whole boiled lobster while Nicky dined on fried clam strips and Joe dug into a fried haddock sandwich. Nile could easily have spent another week in that house by the sea, but Andy thought that another job might be on the horizon, and Joe suggested that they go to Europe early to establish Nile’s first Swiss bank account.

By now, Nile knew enough about their methods of operation that she had no illusions of simply driving to Logan Airport and flying coach on Lufthansa to Zürich. Instead, Andy had booked them a side job escorting a shipment of pharmaceuticals on a UPS flight. The accommodations were nothing to write home about, but, as Andy pointed out, they were off the grid, they were making money instead of spending it, and as cargo escorts, they could wear their own clothes instead of UPS uniforms. Nile had to concede that last point, and Andy promised to treat her to a significant amount of Swiss chocolate to make up for bedding down in a cargo hold.

Once in Switzerland, Andy drove them to a safe house just outside of Lugano, as dusty and dilapidated as Nile had expected it would be. Nicky immediately went back out to go food shopping while Andy, Joe, and Nile removed dust covers from furniture and freshened up the living space.

“So far, that’s safe houses near Paris, London, Boston, and here,” Nile said, as she wiped down the kitchen counter. “How many of these places do you have?”

“More than a few,” Andy said, rooting through a silverware drawer. “We try to have at least one within four hours of most major cities in the world. Easier to keep our gear in a house like this than in a hotel or hostel.”

Nile looked at the house, which clearly had not seen life in years. “Where do you get places like this?”

Andy shrugged. “Depends. We own a couple of them outright, mostly the ones in the Americas. I don’t know the details. Joe can tell you more. Honestly, a lot of the ones in Europe we just sort of . . . found. Abandoned, after wars. We claimed quite a few places in 1946.”

Nile decided she didn’t want to think too closely about how those houses had come to be abandoned. “Do I even want to know what you did in World War Two?”

“Different things,” Andy said. “We split up for a few years. I flew with the Night Witches for a while. That was where I learned to fly a plane. I think Booker might have been with the French Resistance.”

“Nicky and Joe?”

“You’d have to ask them. But they don’t like to talk about it much.”

Nile tried to work up the courage to ask Joe about the Second World War as they drove into the city the next day, but only got as far as asking him about the safe houses. Joe described a trust, buried within several shell companies similar to those that protected some of their liquid financial assets. “All this, I’m happy to teach you,” he said. “But first, let’s get you set up.”

He brought her to a bank called Edmond de Rothschild, explaining that he knew the family who had founded it. “They were Jewish, and wealthy, which was not an easy thing to be in Europe in those days,” he said. “They were strange people, but kind, and they treated me with as much respect as they gave to Nicky, so I knew that I could trust them.”

Nile and Joe stayed at the bank for just over an hour. When they emerged into the afternoon sunshine, Nile had an account listed discreetly under a number instead of her name, filled with a generous portion of money from the group account at the same bank. She worried about paying it back, but Joe assured her that it was a grant and not a loan.

“The money will replenish itself sooner or later,” he said, “and we can afford to wait for later. It’s more important that you have your own money and your own bank cards. After all, you may not always want to travel with us.”

Nile had to smile at that. “It’s not that you and Nicky don’t give adorable PDA,” she admitted. “But sometimes a girl just needs to find her own entertainment.”

Joe poked her in the shoulder, and she laughed at him. Still giggling, they made their way through broad streets and a lovely green park to a small ice cream café on the lake shore. Andy and Nicky waited for them there. Andy was licking an ice cream cone that featured at least three different bright pastel colors of gelato, and she waved as she saw them approaching.

“Kiwi, raspberry, and passion fruit,” she said. “Go get something good, and then come join us.”

Nile and Joe headed toward the café, although both of them noticed that Nicky had no ice cream, but was contemplating a small cup of coffee with an oddly pensive look on his face. Joe bought a cone of coffee and hazelnut gelato, and Nile decided on apricot and passion fruit, and they returned to the table. Nicky was still staring resolutely at his coffee.

Andy waved for them to sit down. “We’ve got a job,” she said.

Joe glanced over at Nicky. “Human traffickers?”

“Drug smugglers?” Nile asked.

“Exotic animals,” Andy said.

Nile and Joe blinked at each other. Nile recalled an old cop show she’d seen as a teenager that had featured a tiger, a monkey in a basketball, and two cops in their underwear. Privately, she decided that, if anyone was going to strip down to bra and panties for this job, she was going to make sure it was Andy. “Am I going to need tips on tiger wrestling?” she asked.

Andy smiled. “Not this time. There’s a shipment of slow lorises coming in. We’re going to intercept it, take down the smugglers, and hand off any of the lorises that survived the transport to an animal rescue agency. Copley’s got it all arranged.”

Nile licked her gelato, and took out her phone to Google slow lorises. “They’re pretty cute.”

“And venomous, which is why Copley thought we’d be good for it,” Andy said. “Well, you’ll be good for it. I’ll concentrate on the smugglers, but I’ll leave the lorises to you. Just be careful. Loris venom stings like a mother.”

“Okay, so we’ll wear gloves.” Nile looked at Nicky, who still had not really acknowledged any of them. “We’ll be okay, right?”

Andy sighed. “The lorises are coming in by ship. We’ll intercept them at the port.”

Joe looked pained. “What port, Andy?”

“Genoa.”

It took Nile a minute, but then the implications of what Andy had just said hit her.

“When was the last time you were there?” she asked, carefully aiming the question to the group at large.

“1725,” Joe said softly. He had scooted his chair over closer to Nicky’s, but Nicky remained stubbornly locked inside his own head, refusing to look up from his coffee, which was growing colder by the second.

Andy licked her ice cream again and looked awkward. “We’ll get hotel rooms nearby, spend a day or so after the job,” she said.

No one spoke for a few moments after that. Nile looked at Nicky’s hand, clenched into a fist, on the table beside his coffee cup. Slowly, she covered his hand with her own, waiting a few seconds, as though the warmth of her skin could actually melt his fist open. And, after a moment, he did relax his hand just enough that she could nudge his fingers loose and actually hold his hand. He returned the grip, and finally looked up. Though his face remained as closed off as before, his eyes were wide and haunted.

“I got you,” she said. “We all got you. Semper fi, you know?”

The corner of Nicky’s mouth twitched, and a little bit of the tension left his frame. Joe put his hand on the back of Nicky’s neck and massaged it a little. Slowly, Nicky began to relax.

Andy blew out a breath of her own. “Let’s figure out a plan,” she said. “We should leave in a few hours so we can scope out the port before the ship docks.”

Later, in the car, driving through Northern Italy, Nile glanced around. Nicky was driving, his attention entirely consumed by the other drivers on the road. Joe and Andy, like all good soldiers, were conked out in their seats. Nile slid her phone from her pocket and made sure it was on mute before texting.

_Where are you from?_

Booker’s reply came fast enough that Nile thought he must be somewhere in the same time zone. _Beaumont-en-Verdunois. Northern France. Not too far from Belgium._

Nile considered a moment before she responded. _Do you ever go back there?_

Booker texted back a skull emoji. As Nile wondered what he meant by that, he explained. _It was destroyed in 1918._ He followed up with a link to a Wikipedia page about _les villages détruits_. It was a short enough read, and Nile figured that Booker hadn’t been terribly attached to the place to begin with. Just as she finished the page, another text came through.

_Where are you?_

Andy hadn’t said that Booker couldn’t know that. He couldn’t come to find them, but there was no reason he shouldn’t know. _Driving to Genoa. For a job._

A sad-face emoji came back, once more followed by an actual text. _Understood. I wish you the best._

_Thanks_. Nile slid her phone back into her pocket, curled against the car window, and closed her eyes.


	2. Where I Want To Be

  1. **Where I Want To Be**



Nile had been a little bit worried about how Nicky would perform, but her concerns melted away once he parked the car near the docks. His features had settled into the still, blank mask of concentration that he tended to wear in a fight, and he scaled the warehouse near the pier with ease. When the pet traders who were to receive the shipment of lorises arrived, Nicky dispatched them so fast that they never knew what hit them. Nile and Andy stowed the bodies in a back corner of the warehouse, and Joe searched them until he found the papers that he needed to take their place.

Nile and Andy arranged themselves in their own pre-selected hiding places. A truck arrived at the gate and blinked its lights, and Joe darted out to unlock the gate.

“The animal rescue crew is here,” he said, after returning to the pier.

Andy nodded. “They’re prepared to wait?”

“As long as they need.”

“Good. It shouldn’t be long now.”

Sure enough, a smallish cargo boat cut its engines and glided up to the dock fifteen minutes later. Joe greeted the men who disembarked and pulled out the shipping papers he had taken from the actual pet traders. The smugglers seemed satisfied, and began to unload cages onto the dock. Joe helped them carry the cages into the warehouse, and Nile slipped inside just before they finished the job and drew a Bowie knife from her ankle sheath.

“Twenty cages,” Joe murmured. “They’re bringing in the last two.”

Nile nodded, and huddled deeper in the shadows. A few of the lorises in the cages next to her chittered weakly and wriggled around. Most of them lay still. Nile flattened herself against the wall as two of the smugglers came in bearing cages. She waited until they had stacked the cages with the others and had turned to leave, then leaped from her hiding place. She hamstrung one of the smugglers, who went down yelling. His screams distracted his companions, who then failed to notice Andy sprinting at them from a different angle. Between them, Nile and Andy incapacitated most of the smugglers, and Nicky shot the last one in the knee from his rooftop perch.

“Is that all of them?” Joe asked.

Andy counted noses, and nodded. “I’ll call Copley. He’ll bring the Italian border police in. They’ve been looking to break this smuggling ring for years.”

Joe kept a rifle trained on the smugglers, and Nile and Nicky went to escort the animal rescue people into the warehouse. Nile turned a flashlight on the loris cages, and was startled to see their enormous eyes glowing as if they were cats. After a moment, she found a better angle for the light and was able to see the lorises properly for the first time.

“Holy shit. These things are adorable.”

The animal rescue workers opened several of the cages and began to shift lorises between them. Nicky watched for a moment, then seemed to pick up the pattern of what they were doing and moved to help them. Most of the lorises flopped limply as they were transferred between cages. With a dull shock, Nile realized what had happened.

“Are they all dead?”

Nicky conferred with the animal rescue workers in soft Italian, and then turned to Nile. “Not all. But most of them. The others are very sick.”

One of the animal rescue workers added a comment, and Nicky translated once again. “They don’t travel well, and they’ve had their teeth pulled out so they can’t bite. They don’t make good pets.”

Sobered, Nile picked up the one living loris in the cage nearest to her and carried it over to the cage that contained the few other living lorises. “I’m sorry, little buddy,” she said. “I hope these people can take care of you. Maybe even send you home.”

Nicky flashed her a quick smile and picked up another loris. “That’s the dream. Isn’t that right, _bambino_?”

In the end, the animal rescue workers drove away with a cage of nine living lorises as the sun rose over Genoa. Andy drove them to a small budget hotel in one of the older parts of the city, where they had two adjoining rooms reserved. Joe and Nicky disappeared into one, and Nile followed Andy into the other. Andy claimed the shower, but Nile was so tired that she simply took her shoes off, washed the loris odor out of her hands at the sink, and flopped down onto the bed. She was asleep within minutes.

After an eventful night, Andy allowed the group to sleep in for much of the morning. They reconvened at a café near the hotel. Even though none of them had much appetite, the coffee was good, and they lingered for a while, toying with small plates. Eventually, Andy suggested a visit to the local aquarium for the afternoon, and Joe countered with an offer to take Nile to an art museum. Nile opened a brochure from the hotel and read about a one-ticket tour of three palazzos on the Via Garibaldi.

Nicky smiled at them. “Tourist traps all. I’m going to find a good bookstore. I’ve read everything in the Lugano house fifteen times already.”

“Have fun,” Joe said. “Don’t get run over by a pack of little old widows on Vespas.”

“That’s Florence,” Nicky said, and he leaned over to give Joe a quick kiss on the lips.

Andy fished sunglasses out of her jacket pocket. “He’s a big boy, Joe. I think he can cross the street by himself. Nicky, let’s meet at the hotel in . . . what do we think, is three hours enough for looking around?”

Nicky and Joe looked at each other and shrugged. “Should be,” Joe said. “We can plan the rest of the afternoon and evening from there.”

“Perfect. Three hours, then back at the hotel.”

Nile asked Nicky how to get to the Via Garibaldi from the café. He pointed her in the right direction, then walked away.

The palazzo tour was every bit as astonishing as Nile had hoped for, although she was definitely ready for more coffee and a snack by the end. Three amazing palaces, all filled with richly decorated rooms each more dazzling than the last, had been almost overwhelming, and Nile really wanted a chance to sit and contemplate and process what she had just seen. She returned to their hotel exactly at the rendezvous hour, and sank down onto a sofa in the lobby where she could keep an eye on the street. Andy and Joe ambled in a few minutes later.

“. . . They’re fish, Andy,” Joe said. “How many fish have you seen in your lifetime? For that matter, how many have you eaten?”

Andy laughed. “That’s the thing about animals. They’re all the same, and they’re all different. How many different horses have we loved through the centuries?”

“Speaking of riding –“

Nile sat up from where she had slouched nearly flat. “We had gerbils,” she put in. “Four of them, one right after another.”

Both Andy and Joe laughed, and they sat down on the couch opposite Nile’s. “All right,” Andy said. “We’re just waiting on Nicky, and then we can make evening plans.”

“Nicky’s probably got his nose stuck in a book,” Joe said. “Let’s give him a few minutes. Nile, tell me about the palazzo tour.”

Nile launched into an animated recital of the artwork and décor she had seen, and Joe alternated between asking her for more detail and teasing Andy about having missed such pinnacles of the human imagination in favor of fish. It was only when Nile paused for breath that she realized that they’d been talking for twenty minutes, and Nicky still hadn’t arrived. “You think Nicky got lost?” she asked.

Andy snorted. “Not likely. He has the best sense of direction of anyone I’ve ever met, and this is his city. He’s probably dawdling somewhere.”

“I’ll text him.” Joe took out his phone and fired off a quick text. After a few minutes, he frowned at the screen and dialed a number. “Nicky . . .” he said, in a tone of voice that made Nile think that he had encountered voicemail. “We’re at the hotel. Whatever book you’re reading, just buy it and come back so we can regroup. Love you.” His voice was light, but a worried frown spread across his face.

Andy’s smile had vanished, and a tight ball of anxiety grew in Nile’s stomach. She wondered if the animal smugglers had escaped and started looking for revenge, or if there were more corrupt pharma executives living in Renaissance palazzos in Genoa. Clearly, the same thought had occurred to Joe when he called Nicky a second time. He ended the call without leaving a message. “Voicemail again,” he said.

“Nicky always answers your calls,” Andy said slowly. “Or he sends a text with one of those little pictures. Like a heart.”

“An emoji,” Nile supplied. “Should one of us go looking for him?”

“We’ll all go,” Andy said. “If we need to do an extraction . . .”

Nile frowned. “Shouldn’t someone wait here, in case he comes back?” Someone mortal like Andy, she did not add. As if Andy could read her mind, her eyes flashed in Nile’s general direction.

“If he were going to come back on his own, he’d be here by now,” Joe said. “We’re going to find him right now. Phones on. If all else fails, we can trace signals.”

They exchanged one last worried glance and headed back out into the street.

Nile had never missed the straight streets and wide alleys of Chicago more than that afternoon, as she wove in and out of tiny, winding medieval streets. More than once, she darted by what she assumed was just a space between buildings before she spotted a sign and realized that, even though it seemed barely wide enough for a person to walk in, it was actually a street. She must have passed at least a dozen of these small _vias_ when she heard a woman’s voice scolding someone around the corner from where she was. She ducked into the next little street and stopped cold.

A woman in a housedress stood just outside a tiny fruit and vegetable shop, cursing and complaining. And, only an arm’s length away from her, Nicky sat curled into a ball in the middle of the dusty, filthy street, sobbing as though his heart had shattered into a million pieces. He didn’t look physically injured, so Nile took a moment to text the name of the street to Andy and Joe, and then hurried to Nicky’s side.

He was crying so hard that he didn’t even notice her approach, but the woman in the produce shop did. She let loose with a torrent of Italian invective that went so fast that Nile couldn’t make out a word of it. But, if the woman’s hand gestures were any indication, Nile guessed that the woman was irritated at what she thought was a maudlin drunk driving away her business. She tried to use her own hand gestures to reassure the woman that she had the situation under control, but she didn’t even believe it herself. Nevertheless, the woman stopped scolding, gave a contemptuous huff, and returned to her shop.

Nile crouched down and craned her neck to see if she could get a glimpse of Nicky’s face. “Nicky,” she called softly. “Nicky, it’s Nile. Joe and Andy are on their way. We’re going to take care of you. Nicky, what’s wrong? What happened to you?”

Nicky said nothing coherent, but rocked convulsively as he gasped and cried. Nile swallowed a lump in her own throat and tried again. “Nicky, what happened? Can I touch you, Nicky? Just on the shoulder, just so you know I’m here.”

To her everlasting relief, she heard Joe’s voice at the street corner. “Nicky!” he cried, and hurried over to squat down next to them. “Nicky, oh Nicky,” he moaned.

Nile looked up and saw Andy standing over them, looking stricken. “I just found him like this,” Nile said. “I don’t think he’s hurt, not physically. The lady in that fruit shop was pretty mad, though.”

“Nicky, come here,” Joe said. He grasped Nicky’s arms and pulled gently. Finally, Nicky looked up. He didn’t seem to see any of them, but he leaned forward and buried his face in Joe’s chest. Joe murmured and crooned and petted Nicky’s hair, and Nicky’s choking sobs lengthened into breathier cries.

“That’s right, Nicky,” Joe said. “Breathe a little bit. Just keep breathing.”

Andy walked into the fruit shop. Nile waited outside, ready to chase away any passersby who might get too curious about the activity in the street. Nicky shuddered, and went limp in Joe’s arms. Joe pressed a little kiss against Nicky’s hairline and slid his arm around Nicky’s waist.

“Let’s stand up now,” he said. “Sweet Nicky, this is no place for you, sitting in the gutter. Let’s stand up, and we can go back to the hotel and be safe.” He glanced over and made eye contact with Nile for the first time since they had split up to go searching for Nicky. Nile helped him raise Nicky to his feet, and then backed off a step. Joe and Nicky stood together, swaying, Nicky still leaning heavily on Joe. The last of his cries faded into soft moans and then into silence.

Andy emerged from the shop, carrying a large bag that smelled like a fruit salad. “I think everything will be okay in there,” she said to Nile. “I told her we’d get him home and sobered up. She had some less-than-kind words to say about . . . well, distraught men and their boyfriends, but she’s calmed down now.”

“So has Nicky,” Nile replied. “He might need help walking, but at least he’s upright. That’s a start.”

The walk back to the hotel was slow and painful, but they made it in the end. Andy left half of the fruit she had bought with Nicky and Joe, and promised to bring them more substantial food later. She and Nile ended up finding a local Chinese restaurant that delivered, and ordered food in, enough for all four of them. Neither of them wanted to go out again that evening, and they also didn’t want to abandon their friends.

The next morning, Nile stuffed pastries and a few other goodies from the hotel’s breakfast buffet into one of the Chinese delivery bags, and they went back upstairs and knocked on the door next to their room. “Joe?” Nile called. “Nicky? Are you guys okay in there? We’ve got breakfast.”

Joe opened the door, dressed in the t-shirt and boxers that he had slept in. He wrapped first Andy and then Nile in long hugs. “Thank you,” he said softly. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.” Nile handed over the bag of food and earned herself an extra shoulder squeeze for it.

Nicky was still in bed. He was awake, and was able to focus on them, although he was even paler than usual, and his eyes had huge dark smudges beneath them. Andy perched on the edge of the bed next to him and stroked her hand down the side of his face. “Back with us?” she asked with a smile. Nicky nodded, though he couldn’t quite muster a facial expression. He looked past Andy and spotted Nile, and tried to sit up, flailing a bit as if he had lost operational control of his limbs.

Joe climbed onto the bed and pulled Nicky the rest of the way into sitting up against him. Nicky regarded Nile solemnly. His mouth twitched a little, and she had the strange thought that, somewhere inside his head, he was trying to smile at her, even though his face was still slack and weary. “Nile,” he murmured. “I think . . . maybe I frightened you yesterday. I am sorry.”

It wasn’t much of an apology, but Nile could see that it was all that Nicky was capable of making at that moment, and also that he meant every word of it. And she did appreciate it; she hadn’t expected how terrifying it had been to see Nicky, usually the calmest and most collected of the group, completely breaking down. “Remind me never to piss you off,” she said, and Nicky did manage a tiny smile at that.

“Andy, would you bring me a towel from the bathroom?” Joe asked. When Andy brought it, he spread it over himself and Nicky, and indicated that Nile should sit at the end of the bed, so that all four of them occupied it together.

“Breakfast in bed, how about that?” he asked. He dug a croissant and a slice of ciambellone out of the bag that Nile had provided. Nicky broke off a corner of the ciambellone, and Nile did not miss Joe’s small sigh of relief when he ate it. For herself, Nile had brought a pear from Andy’s fruit purchase, and Andy selected a container of strawberry yogurt.

Surrounded by his family, eating small bites of cake and leaning into Joe’s one-armed embrace, Nicky’s focus improved a little bit, and some color began to creep back into his face. Andy and Nile entertained the men with descriptions of the sights they had seen the previous afternoon, and Joe held Nicky close, occasionally pushing another bite of cake between his lips when he thought Nicky needed a distraction. By the time Nile and Andy finished their stories, Nicky seemed ready to string more than a few words together.

“I’m sorry for yesterday,” he said softly. “I did go out looking for a bookstore. But as I looked around, I realized . . . this, where we are, it’s the part of the city where I grew up. The streets are still here, and . . . my feet just took me.”

Andy looked pained. “You went looking for your old home, didn’t you?”

“That wasn’t my plan,” Nicky said. “But I knew those streets so well, and my feet just kept walking. And I ended up in the street where my house was, and I – it just hit me like a storm.”

“Homesick?” Nile asked.

Nicky nodded. “It’s changed so much. The streets are there, but I could barely recognize them. Where I used to run and play, and there’s almost nothing left. And then . . . I knew – I _knew_ I was in the right street, but I couldn’t find my house. I’d forgotten where my home was. And more than anything, I wanted my mother, and . . . it’s . . . I don’t remember much after that.”

He shuddered, and turned away, hiding his face in Joe’s shoulder. Andy sighed. “Oh, Nicky,” she said. Nile half expected her to scold him for causing a scene, but when she looked at Andy, she saw only sorrow and compassion in her expression.

Nile swallowed. “It’s hard when your home still exists,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She imagined herself returning to Chicago a hundred – no, a _thousand_ – years in the future, and only seeing the ghosts of the neighborhoods she used to know. Even now, the idea of just going back, getting on the L, going to a ball game, or getting a hot dog seemed overwhelmingly foreign. She found the lump in the blanket that was Nicky’s foot, the closest part of him that she could reach, and she put her hand on it and held on.

Nicky emerged just enough to acknowledge her. “Thank you for finding me,” he choked out. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”

Joe used the arm that wasn’t holding Nicky to fold the towel so that it contained the crumbs from their breakfast and deposit it on the floor next to the bed. “We’re going to stay here for a while longer,” he said. “But maybe later, we can all take a walk together before we go back to Lugano.”

Nicky nodded, and burrowed a little deeper into Joe’s embrace. Andy gave them a soft smile. “I’d like that,” she said. She got up and started putting the rest of the debris from breakfast back into the bag. Nile gave Nicky’s foot one last squeeze of solidarity and followed Andy out of the room, leaving Nicky and Joe to each other.


	3. Where The Heart Is

  1. **Where The Heart Is**



After their adventure in Genoa, the group split up for a while. Nicky and Joe left the address of a small house on Santa Marija Bay in Malta, and Andy announced that she was going to disappear in Paris for a while. Nile considered her options. None of the others had spoken about it much, but she could sense that Andy’s newfound mortality disturbed all of them, Andy included. She had received basic first aid training in the Marine Corps, and she was fairly sure that Nicky and Joe had picked up centuries’ worth of tricks for rendering emergency care to people they’d meet once and never see again. But none of them had a full education in taking care of injured people beyond that. So she decided to go to Los Angeles and train as a paramedic.

Nile had been a little bit worried about how to explain herself to her new classmates, but Copley had come through with a plausible background for the school, and Andy and Nicky and Joe e-mailed and texted helpful bits of advice. She went by her middle name, Maya, and told her classmates and lab partners that she had been in the service, but that she didn’t want to talk about her time overseas, which was entirely true. She was still originally from Chicago, and still had lost her father in combat, but now she had lost the rest of her family in an accident. Which, when you thought about it hard enough from the right angle, was also still technically true. It also got her an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner from her lab partner Monica.

Paramedic training was physically grueling and mentally challenging, but Nile had been a Marine, and she was more than capable of handling it. When she had a free moment, she toured art museums in the city and went to public lectures at the UCLA history department, on the theory that she didn’t want to be left out of immortal conversation in the future. She followed the news from Chicago – reading her own obituary on the _Sun Times_ website was just bizarre – and cheered privately in her tiny studio apartment when her brother “won” an unexpected college scholarship from her newly-established foundation that offered assistance to relatives of deceased soldiers of color.

She even found a boyfriend. Monica’s roommate Danielle was a graduate student in anthropology, and she invited Monica to a student party, and Monica invited Nile. Nile ended up spending much of the evening getting to know a graduate student named Braxton, who was just planning his dissertation. Braxton was the perfect candidate for a boyfriend, because he would be going off to Mongolia to do his dissertation field research in a year or so, and Nile could let him go without ever revealing her secret. And the fact that both Nicky and Joe had sent approving messages when she texted Braxton’s photo to them didn’t hurt, either.

The first time Nile invited Braxton to spend the night at her place, he brought a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine. Nile cooked pasta with pesto sauce just the way Nicky had taught her, with potatoes and green beans mixed in. Braxton’s eyes lit up when he saw it.

“Pasta alla Genovese!” he said. “This is fantastic. It reminds me of when I was in Italy, just after undergrad. Have you ever been?”

“Once,” Nile said. “But I learned to make this from a friend.”

“That’s even better.” Braxton put a forkful of pasta in his mouth and smiled. “This is great. Tell your friend thank you from me. Old family recipe?”

Nile chuckled. “Not exactly.” She had in fact asked Nicky the same question the first time he’d made it for her. He had laughed at her in his friendly way before explaining that he had been over five hundred years old before anyone in Genoa even saw a potato.

“Well, wherever your friend picked this up, tell her I love it.”

“Him.”

Braxton waggled his eyebrows at Nile. “Oh? Do I have to worry about competition for your lovely self?”

“Nope. He and his husband both think you’re perfect for me.”

“I guess I’ll just have to live up to their expectations.” Braxton winked and raised his wine glass at Nile.

He proved his worth well enough that night, and Nile’s life settled into a comfortable semblance of normality after that. She had her classes, her art museums and history lectures, and her boyfriend. As her social circle coalesced, the awkward getting-to-know-you conversations where she had to remember her fake background receded, and she and her friends talked about day-to-day news instead. For weeks at a time, she could live as though she were a person just like anyone else, and she loved it.

But she could not forget her other life – and, she realized, she didn’t really want to do that. Although neither Nicky nor Joe had ever quite become comfortable with video chat, she did maintain a lengthy text thread with them. They sent photos of a turquoise blue lagoon, of the garden near their house, and a selfie that Joe had taken of himself and Nicky hiking a little further inland. Nile passed along Braxton’s opinion of the pasta, and Nicky sent hearts. Andy wasn’t as big on texting, but she did send first a postcard from Paris and then later an honest-to-God letter that referenced someone named Celeste whom Nile didn’t know. She did read enough between the lines to be happy for Andy, though; five hundred years of mourning Quynh had clearly taken a toll on her.

A fanfare from the television news broadcast she’d had on for background noise interrupted her. “Breaking news tonight from Chicago,” the anchor announced, and Nile hurried to turn up the volume.

“A rent strike has prompted hundreds of people to take to the streets,” the anchor went on. “Protest leaders say that rising rents combined with stagnant wages have forced many families already on the edge out of their homes. For more, we go to Bill Blair, on the South Side of the city.”

“Thank you, Laura.” The scene switched to a stretch of 55th Street that Nile had sometimes ridden through on the bus. Now it was filled with people milling around, carrying signs, and occasionally chanting in response to a woman about Nile’s age carrying a bullhorn.

Bill Blair offered color commentary on the scene, but Nile tuned him out. Her first impulse was to reach for her phone, and it was in her hand before she remembered that she couldn’t call her mother and brother to see if they were okay. Her next thought was to text Nicky and Joe, but she had no idea what time it was in Malta, and she didn’t want to wake them up. Booker’s face flashed briefly through her mind, but then she had a better idea.

Copley was not only awake, but he was watching the news as well. He was in DC on business, but he agreed to fly out to Los Angeles for the weekend to consult with her.

Saturday afternoon, Nile met Copley at a Starbucks near campus, and Nile explained her dilemma. Her mother had sometimes struggled, but she had always managed to make rent. But her mother was also not getting any younger, and Nile was worried not only about what would happen to her mother after she retired, but what would happen to the house. None of them had told Copley about Nicky’s breakdown in Genoa – some things were just for family – but Nile hadn’t forgotten about it, or the new fears that she had developed because of it.

“I have all this money,” she said, “and I can’t really do much good with it. I just want to buy the damn house and give it to my mother as a gift, you know? Make sure she’s taken care of, like I did for my brother.”

“You’ve got a good heart, Nile,” Copley said. “I trust you understand why giving that house to your mother is impossible.”

“Yeah.” Nile stared into her latte. “It’s just . . . I worry about her sometimes. I could send my brother to college, but I don’t know what he’ll do after that.”

Copley shrugged. “You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about you not being able to buy the house.”

Nile looked up sharply. Copley’s suggestion raced through her mind and encountered other things that she had learned recently. “I couldn’t buy it in my name. My mom would know. But Andy and the others have all of this property through shell companies. I could do that, too.”

“I don’t know how they’ve got it set up, but I’m sure they’d be happy to help you,” Copley said. “And I could lend a hand, too, if you need any tracks erased.”

Nile thought of something else and frowned. “My mom would notice, though. If she suddenly didn’t have to pay rent.”

“Hey, Maya!”

Nile turned and spotted Braxton in line at the counter waving to her. She smiled and waved back, and then turned to Copley. “My boyfriend. He doesn’t know anything.”

“Got it.”

Braxton brought something herby-smelling over to the table and kissed Nile on the cheek. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I’ve got a shift at the library in a couple of minutes, so I can’t stay, but I had to come say hi.”

Nile couldn’t help smiling; as much as she had to hide from Braxton, she really did enjoy his company. “We’re still on for tonight?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Art history colloquium,” Nile explained to Copley. “Beautiful pictures, dim lecture hall that’s perfect for making out, and the art history department serves the best snacks after the lectures.” She had a little invisible moment of panic when she realized that Braxton and Copley were looking at each other, and she had no idea how to introduce them.

Copley extended his hand for Braxton to shake. “Hi,” he said. “My name is Copley Jamison. I’m a probate attorney.”

Ah. That idea had merit. “He’s helping me deal with my mom’s estate,” she said.

Braxton shook Copley’s hand. “That sounds heavy. I’m glad that you’re helping Maya out here. I won’t keep you.” He turned to Nile. “The talk is at eight. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty?”

“Sounds good.” Nile gave Braxton a kiss and sent him on his way.

Copley waited until Braxton had left the Starbucks before he spoke. “That was clever. Good luck with him; I know it was hard for Andy and Booker to keep up interpersonal relationships.”

“I don’t know what’s harder,” Nile said. “Keeping up a relationship or figuring out what to do with that house. I just don’t like the thought of taking rent from my own mom.”

Copley shrugged. “Some of it would go for maintenance, of course.”

“Yeah, but the rest? Landlords use that to make a living, and I don’t need –“ Just then, an idea struck her. “Oh my God. I think I know how to make this work. Thank you so much for coming and talking this out with me.”

“You going to tell me this grand plan of yours?” Copley looked amused, but also intrigued.

“Not yet. I need to run a few things by Joe first. And maybe Andy. Once I actually have a grand plan, you’ll hear about it. Trust me.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Copley ordered an Uber to go to the airport, and chugged the last of his coffee. “Good luck with the plan. And have fun with whatshisname at the lecture tonight!”

Refining her raw idea into a workable plan took an enormous amount of texting with Joe, so much so that he finally broke down and agreed to learn to use video chat. Their first conversation consisted largely of Joe commenting on how strange it was to be talking to Nile’s picture on his screen and having it talk back to him. At one point, Nicky burst into the room looking alarmed because he had heard a conversation and thought that someone had broken into the house. But after they got past the initial weirdness, Joe had plenty of ideas for how to get the results that Nile wanted. She also texted Booker once or twice on the sly, just to confirm some techniques that she thought he might know more about than Joe did.

Before she set her plan into motion, Nile decided that she wanted Andy’s approval as well. She was a grown woman with money of her own, and there was no reason she couldn’t do what she wanted with it, but she also respected Andy and the choices that had kept the group largely unharmed and intact for centuries. Even if Andy’s methods were crumbling in the face of twenty-first-century technology, she still had millennia of experience and wisdom, and Nile figured she would be a fool not to take advantage of that.

She considered the best way to go about it, and decided that, as slow as it was, a letter might be the way to go. Names on envelopes could easily be disguised with first initials, and a paper letter could be completely destroyed, leaving no trace behind, should that become necessary. Nile typed the letter in one sitting and printed it without even saving the document, for the best security she could think of.

Andy’s reply came a month later, but what was a month in an immortal life? Nile tore open the envelope and read the letter.

_Ma chérie (as they say here),_

_Thank you for writing to me. It’s odd to feel so honored to be asked for my wisdom after so many years, but nevertheless it is an honor._

_I am glad that you have such a kind heart, more like Nicky’s than my own. At the same time, you are wise to consider the consequences of your kind actions. I think that your plan is sound at least for the next few decades; it will ensure that your mother and your brother are cared for, and that you will retain possession of your birth home for at least a century, perhaps two. Within that timeframe, everything seems reasonable to me._

_But I urge you to remember that our lives are long beyond the comprehension of most people, and certainly beyond the forethought of city planning departments. Very few things are truly permanent; my own country of birth was subsumed into history so long ago that I no longer remember where I was born. I know that Nicky’s experience affected you deeply, but while he is fortunate that Genoa itself still stands, the real reason that he could not find his childhood home is that it had been destroyed and rebuilt many times since he last left it. Both Joe and Booker were born in towns that no longer exist at all._

_All of which is to say that nothing is permanent, even a city as great as Chicago. Your plan will preserve your house for many years, perhaps even a century. But you must be prepared to let it go and to mourn it when its time comes, as all of our times must come. Do what you plan to keep it and your family safe for now, but always remember that, for those such as ourselves, our home is with each other, in the end._

_I must close now. Celeste has returned from the market, and we have planned a quiet dinner à deux to be eaten on our balcony overlooking the City of Light._

_À_ _la prochaine,_

_Andy_

Nile read Andy’s letter several times over the next few days, trying to wrap her mind around the depth of time that Andy had described. It seemed that Andy was okay with her idea, although her approval sounded more like a warning than anyone else. _Don’t fall too deeply in love with something that won’t last._ It was good advice, Nile decided, but possibly advice for much, much later in her life. For all that she was immortal, she still wasn’t yet thirty. It was still normal for her to want to make sure her mom was set up well for retirement and beyond. 

And as for “beyond?” Well, kids were supposed to outlive their parents. She’d still be just like anyone else when her mother passed, and she supposed she’d mourn and miss her, but she would embark on immortality knowing that she had done what a daughter ought to do for her mother. She wasn’t looking forward to the moments a thousand years in the future when she would need her mother, as Nicky had done, but she took comfort in having photographs, which was more than any of the others had. In the end, she decided, she had to live a life, and part of that was to secure her home for as long as she could.

Nile picked up her phone, took a deep breath, and texted Copley’s secure number.

“Impressive,” Copley said, leafing through the portfolio that Nile had given him. He studied each page carefully, sometimes nodding or smiling as he discovered something especially clever. “Oh, very good use of this account – I don’t think it’s a situation that that sort of account was ever meant to cover, but it’s perfectly legal. And the release of this money is triggered by . . .” Copley flipped back a few pages to check. 

“Her retirement,” Nile supplied. “It’s linked into her pension fund.” 

In the end, the easy part had been assembling the layers of dummy companies to hide Nile’s new ownership of her mother’s home. Nile’s fictitious property management company had made an offer so generous that the landlord couldn’t refuse, and she was sure that he was using the money to snap up something particularly desirable in Ukrainian Village. The real trick had been finding an investment manager who was both smart enough to do what Nile needed and smart enough not to ask too many inconvenient questions. In the end, it was Booker who came through, recommending an acquaintance named Angela Bowen. 

Nile’s job was to divide her mother’s rent money every month. The funds for necessary maintenance expenses and property taxes went into one account, but everything beyond that went into a special high-yield investment portfolio that was Angela Bowen’s domain. Her role was to grow that money as much as possible in the years before Nile’s mother retired, and then release it slowly along with her pension so that she would never want for anything in her old age. Nile would have to entrust her brother with their mother’s physical care when the time came, but at least she had done what she could. And her mother would be able to live in that house as long as she wanted. 

“I see you’ve plotted this out based on a stable rent level,” Copley said. 

“Like I’m going to raise the rent on my own mother.” 

Copley nodded. “Oh, I get that. But what happens when she notices that the rent isn’t going up?” 

Nile laughed. “My mom’s no fool. She’s going to keep her mouth shut around the neighbors, and then she’s going to go to church every Sunday and Wednesday and thank God for her good fortune.”

“And rightly so. She had you for a daughter.” 

Nile didn’t miss Copley’s use of the past tense, but it didn’t hurt as much as it might have a year earlier. “And I have good people to help me,” she said. “Joe’s a good teacher, and Andy helped me put a lot of things in perspective. And Nicky helps me figure out how to balance being a soldier and being . . . well, my mom and my brother’s guardian angel.” 

In fact, once Nicky had mastered his own discomfort with video chat, he had become Nile’s unexpected emotional support throughout the process, always reminding her of the ultimate prize when she felt as though her brain would explode from trying to combine paramedic training with complicated finance. And now that Nile had completed her home project, she had a few other ideas bubbling in the back of her mind about how to thank her new friends.

But first, she had a date with Braxton at the Getty Center. She picked up her portfolio, bade Copley goodbye, and hurried home to change.


	4. Where You Make It

  1. **Where You Make It**



It was a little weird to have gone to the trouble of not only buying a house that Nile did not intend to live in, but also of setting up an elaborate financial structure designed to conceal all evidence that she had in fact bought the house. Normally, buying a house in one’s late twenties would result in a move, perhaps some new furniture acquisitions, or a housewarming party with friends. Nile simply returned to her training, relieved that a significant task had been accomplished and no longer weighed on her mind.

She had worried about what to do with Braxton when the time came to move on. But between the stress of Nile’s own house-buying project and the summer that Braxton spent in the library obsessively preparing for his qualifying exams, they naturally drifted farther apart. To Nile, it seemed as if they wound their relationship down in reverse, shifting from being lovers to friends with benefits, and then later simply to friends. Nile found that she was happy for Braxton when he passed his exams, and that she was also happy for him when he hooked up with another grad student in the department next door to his. She even became friends with Braxton’s new girlfriend and privately took credit for much of the success of that relationship on the strength of some late-night wine-enhanced girls-only conversations.

For herself, Nile completed her paramedic training in eighteen months, graduating near the top of her class. She took a job with an ambulance crew serving Hollywood and Beverly Hills and quickly became an expert at dealing with different types of drug overdoses. And in the end, it was her job with the ambulance crew that brought her other crew back together for the first time in two years.

Nile’s ambulance was one of several called to the obscenely large and sprawling home of a movie producer who specialized in comic-book-derived teen action movies. The immediate cause of the call-out was a teenage girl who had been found floating face-down in the pool in the middle of a party. But even as Nile’s crew worked to resuscitate her, other teenage girls overdosed on cocaine, and one stumbled and fell through a glass coffee table.

Eventually, Nile’s squad leader got fed up calling for increased medical backup and called the police instead. The combination of paramedics, police, a movie producer, and a bevy of teenage girls in bikinis attracted paparazzi, and soon it was all that Nile could do to keep her cap on and her face turned away from the camera flashes. This, she realized, was where half of the images on Copley’s bulletin board had come from.

Just as Nile’s squad got the girl from the pool stable enough for transport, another bikini-clad teenager flung herself into Nile’s arms. “I want to go home!” she cried.

Nile checked her for injuries and spotted some powder residue under her nose. “How about the hospital?” she suggested. She herded the teenager into the ambulance with her nearly-drowned . . . friend? Fellow party-goer? The girl cried on Nile’s shoulder all the way to the hospital.

Later, the hospital called Nile in, saying that the girl had sobered up and had asked for her. When Nile saw her, sitting in a bed in the emergency room, covered with a thin hospital johnny, her heart sank when she realized that the girl couldn’t be much older than fifteen. She revealed that her name was Sophie and that the girl from the pool was called Mackenzie. “I want to go home,” Sophie said.

At least she was talking and coherent. “Where’s home?” Nile asked.

Sophie seemed not to hear her. “I thought it would be fun. But it wasn’t.”

“You thought what would be fun?”

“Coming to Hollywood. I wanted to be a movie star. And I went to parties, ‘cause he said I’d meet people who would put me in movies. But I haven’t been in a movie yet, and it’s scary, and I want to go home!”

Eventually, Nile pieced together that Sophie and Mackenzie and the other girls at the party had been trafficked by a financier she had never heard of but who seemed to have close ties to a string of wealthy and powerful men. She made sure to get the address of the foster home that had agreed to take Sophie until her parents could be contacted. Then she went home and made a series of international phone calls. Copley wasn’t the only one who could arrange jobs, after all.

Nile’s new family was frighteningly adept at getting places in a hurry, and, Nile suspected, not entirely legally. She didn’t care. Just seeing Andy and Nicky and Joe together again gave her a jolt of joy in the midst of her horror and anger at what she had uncovered. Joe set to work uncovering as much information about the traffickers as he could, while Andy disappeared to a location that Nile asked her not to disclose in order to pick up equipment for them. Nile decided that, after herself, Nicky was the one that Sophie was most likely to trust, so she called Sophie’s foster home and asked Sophie to meet them.

Sophie didn’t want to leave the foster home, so the foster parents invited Nile and Nicky for tea. They seemed impressed by Nile’s smart uniform and Nicky’s clean-cut good looks and deferential smile. Sophie and the foster parents sat on the sofa, and Nicky and Nile took armchairs. Sophie clutched a cup of tea and told them details of her experience traveling from Spokane to Hollywood by bus and naively accepting a kind older gentleman’s offer of a place to stay.

Nile took discreet notes and admired Nicky’s listening skills. He never made Sophie feel threatened, but focused his enormous, friendly eyes on her. He made noises of sympathy at the right moments and offered encouraging smiles when she faltered. In the back of her mind, Nile knew that Nicky had at one point been ordained a priest, although she had never quite understood whether or not he had actually served in a church. But watching Nicky interact with Sophie, Nile could absolutely believe that Nicky had heard at least a few confessions over the years.

“Thank you, Sophie,” Nicky said, when Sophie finished talking. “This is very good information. It will help us find the people who hurt you, and they will pay for what they did.”

“What about Mackenzie?” Sophie asked. “She was nice to me sometimes.”

Nile sighed. “She’s alive. But her brain was deprived of oxygen for a while, and there was some brain damage. We’re going to make sure she’s taken care of. Do you know anything about her family, anything that could help us find them?”

Sophie looked ashamed. “She was from Coeur d’Alene, in Idaho. I remembered because it’s kind of near Spokane. Can I – can I give you a hug?”

“Sure.” Nile let Sophie cling to her for a moment. “Thank you for helping us, Sophie,” she said. “And remember. You’re a brave, good person, and we will get the bad guys. You just go home and be a kid again for a while.”

“Okay.” Sophie suppressed a sniffle, but her eyes were already a bit brighter.

Back in the car, Nicky put a comforting arm around Nile’s shoulder. “Thank you for calling us,” he said. “She’ll get to go home.”

Nile took a deep breath. “We can do this.”

“We can. And we will.” Nicky’s smile hardened, and some of the sniper crept back into his expression. “And then those people won’t hurt any more Sophies and Mackenzies.”

Joe’s research was enough to lead the group to an exclusive party being thrown two nights later in Beverly Hills, where the leaders of the trafficking ring were entertaining several high-profile clients. The information that Nile and Nicky brought from their visit with Sophie allowed them to infiltrate the party with ease and sophistication.

Nicky dressed in a steel-colored suit over a black shirt and white necktie, and escorted Nile, who wore an iridescent green outfit that could only be called a “dress” because it barely covered her ass and in fact preserved her modesty only by virtue of nearly an entire roll of double-sided tape. Nicky had thoughtfully placed a pistol for Nile in a holster under his arm, and they had practiced so that she could retrieve it easily even as he pulled a long knife from a holster disguised as his pants pocket. Shortly after they arrived, Joe entered in full Saudi-prince-ready-to-debauch-and-be-debauched robes, followed at a respectful distance by his abaya-clad concubine whose kohl-rimmed eyes scanned the room with over six thousand years of experience.

The extraction was a little bit complicated. They worked as a team to identify the trafficked girls in the room and herd them away to a safe room in the basement. The next task was to separate the innocent spouses of the party guests who, for reasons that Nile preferred not to contemplate, felt that it was appropriate to bring their significant others to a party where they hoped to pick up underage trafficked girls. Nicky and Joe accomplished this task with some ease.

“Nine hundred years of practice making cow eyes at each other,” Andy observed. “You never know what skills will come in handy.”

As much fun as it would have been to gun down every single actual and wannabe child molester in the room, it would be far too much publicity for them to do that in Beverly Hills. Instead, the mission that Andy had devised was one that exposed the traffickers and their clients rather than themselves. Playing on their phones and checking their messages during conversational lulls, they photographed the party guests, sending the photos to the LAPD, the Los Angeles County prosecutor, several carefully selected tabloids, and Twitter. Joe called the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services to pick up the girls, and by the time they arrived, many of the photos were already trending on Twitter. The group escaped during the commotion.

Afterwards, Nicky and Joe went on ahead to their motel. Nile only had room for one guest in her home, and that was Andy. It was the perfect time to pick Andy’s brain, and after they had had a chance to change out of their party clothes, Nile made them both Sleepytime tea to calm down after the excitement of the evening.

Andy inhaled the steam from her tea and smiled. “Ah. This is exactly what I needed.”

“Thank you for coming,” Nile said.

“Of course. This is what we do. And, honestly, I’m glad we were able to do it without much fighting.”

Nile laughed. “I know it wasn’t as fun as some other jobs.”

“No,” Andy said. “Believe me, we appreciate this kind of thing. I’m getting creaky in my mortality, and I’m sure Joe and Nicky appreciate not having to wash blood off of each other again.”

“Especially not in a motel bathroom,” Nile agreed. “And all the girls will go home safely.”

“Thanks to the information we got from . . . what was her name?”

“Sophie.” Nile took a deep breath. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Nicky was amazing with her. Got her to trust him immediately, she told us everything we needed. I’d like to . . . well, to acknowledge that.” And Nile told Andy her plan.

“No,” Andy said when she finished. “Absolutely not.”

Nile took a drink of her tea. “Why not?”

“You know damn well. It puts us at risk. It puts _Nicky_ at risk. You’ve seen what happens if people have that kind of information about us.”

“Bullshit,” Nile retorted. “You said it was a good idea for me to buy my house. Why should finding something for Nicky be any different?”

Andy’s face remained implacable. “It is different. You’re not planning to live in that house.”

“Not right now,” Nile admitted. “But who knows? Thirty years from now? Forty? A hundred, even? Maybe I want to move in after my mom dies. And my brother,” she added, willing herself not to choke up at the thought.

“Nicky and Joe will draw too much attention.”

“In a crowded city? I don’t think so.” Nile shook her head. “They’re smart. They know how to hide in plain sight. They don’t even have to spend a lot of time there.”

Andy frowned. “And you don’t think an empty apartment in the oldest and most expensive part of Genoa wouldn’t draw attention?”

Nile shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be empty. They could make a buck or two renting it out on AirBnB when they’re not there.”

“I still don’t like it,” Andy said. “It’s too permanent.”

“Says the woman living in an apartment in Paris with a balcony and a hot girlfriend.”

Andy shook her head. “Everything is temporary with us.”

Nile bit back a bitter retort and tried again. “Maybe that’s part of the problem. All of this . . . this glorified couch surfing, from one ratty old safe house to the next. You’re basically spending thousands of years being homeless. That’s not any kind of a life.”

Andy shrugged. “It’s gotten us this far.”

“Ha,” Nile said. “You know what it’s gotten us? It’s gotten us Nicky bawling his eyes out in the middle of a street, and us having to carry him back to a cheap hotel.”

She could see that that hit home for Andy, and considered whether to add her next bit of ammunition. Perhaps her mother had in fact raised a fool, but Nile was committed now. “It got us _Booker_ , Andy.”

That shut Andy up for at least thirty seconds. Nile swore she could see Andy’s mind running faster than a hamster on a wheel.

“Joe taught me how to do this, Andy,” Nile said. “And I learned from other people, too. I can do it. And think about what it would mean to Nicky. He’s _hurting_ , Andy. Can’t you see it?”

“He’s been hurting for a long time,” Andy replied. “We all have.” But the sharp tone of refusal had faded from her voice.

Nile pulled up images of the apartment she’d been contemplating on her phone. “Andy, just look at this place. He’ll love it.”

Andy scrolled through the photos, and her face softened a little more. “He really would,” she murmured. Then she shook herself, plastered a scowl across her face, and handed the phone back to Nile. “I don’t know why you think you need my permission,” she said. “You do good all on your own.”

Nile bowed her head to hide her smile.

Now that Nile had had some experience in how the group acquired property, the process of buying an apartment on Nicky’s childhood street in Genoa was largely familiar to her. The real challenge was doing all the transactions from overseas and in Italian, but Nile persisted, and at last she had the title, and the keys to the apartment came in the mail. She hadn’t discussed any of this with Nicky or Joe, just so that she wouldn’t disappoint them if the plan fell through, and as far as she knew, Andy had simply returned to Paris and to Celeste and hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything.

Once Nile actually had the apartment, she wondered how best to break the news to Nicky and Joe. She sat on it for another year, taking a private vacation to Genoa over the winter so that she could furnish the place discreetly and make sure that everything worked. Then she waited for another few months until Copley called the group to intercept a load of looted antiquities from Uganda that was being smuggled into Monaco. The plan had been to stay at a safe house outside Nice, but they arrived to find that the safe house had been badly damaged in an unseasonable storm, and was uninhabitable.

Andy swore, but Nile seized her moment. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get us a place. Just . . . everybody try to stay in one piece for this.”

The operation went relatively smoothly, largely because the smugglers had lower-caliber weapons than usual, possibly to prevent unnecessary damage to their cargo. There was some hand-to-hand struggle, but the smugglers turned out to be relative amateurs in all respects, and the group emerged with only a sprained wrist, a broken ankle, light strangulation, and assorted bruising between them. Nile claimed the driver’s seat in their rental car, while Andy rode shotgun. Nile winked at her, and a slow smile spread over Andy’s face. Joe helped Nicky into the back seat, and Nicky promptly fell asleep on Joe’s shoulder.

The drive was just over two hours, leaving plenty of time for Nicky’s ankle to heal and for the bruises on their bodies to fade. As they passed Arenzano, Nile glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Joe staring at the road signs in confusion.

“Where are we going?” he asked, softly enough that he wouldn’t wake Nicky. “We’re not . . . Nile. You know what happened last time.”

Andy turned around. “Yes. She does. Don’t worry. This is going to be different.”

The medieval areas of Genoa were largely pedestrian zones. Nile parked as close as she could, but they’d still have to walk a bit to get where they were going. She didn’t mind. Everyone was either healed or in decent shape for walking, and the fresh air would help to clear their minds. Nile and Andy got overnight bags out of the trunk while Joe kissed Nicky and scratched behind his ear a little bit to wake him up.

It was still and dark outside, and the streets were empty. Nile led them in silence, her heart pounding in her throat. She knew the instant that Nicky figured out where they were going. He stopped cold, and she could hear his breath coming hard and ragged. Joe wrapped him in a swift, firm embrace. “It’s all right, Nicky. It’s all right. It’ll be all right. Nile knows what she’s doing.”

Nile waited until Nicky could continue and led them to his street. She found the building easily. “We’re here,” she said.

Nicky stared at her, his eyes liquid and shining in the moonlight. “What do you mean?”

For months, Nile had composed a speech in her head that she would deliver at this moment. It was long and eloquent, thanking her new family for taking care of her and welcoming her into their peculiar little circle without thought or question, and explaining that she had now found the perfect way to give something back, to thank them for all that they had done for her. But now, in the moment, she couldn’t remember a word of it.

“It’s for you,” she said. “I know how much you miss having a home. I don’t know if this is the right building – the right one probably doesn’t exist any more anyway. But I thought . . . maybe this could be something close enough.”

Nile took the keys out of her pocket and folded Nicky’s trembling hands around them. “It’s the third floor. Which is actually the fourth floor, because apparently the ground floor is a thing here.”

“Go on,” Andy said. “Let’s take a look. I’m tired and I want to sit down.”

Nicky unlocked the building’s front door. There was an elevator – Nile thought it might come in handy for moving gear or people whose crippling injuries hadn’t healed enough to manage stairs – and it creaked its way to the correct floor. Nile pointed Nicky to the apartment door, and showed him which key unlocked it.

The apartment was clean, pretty, and modern. Nile wasn’t sure what kind of décor Joe and Nicky liked, so she had kept the furniture plain and inexpensive. There were two bedrooms, one furnished with twin beds so that Nile and Andy could stay over if they needed. The living room had a sturdy dining table and a couple of bookcases. The kitchen had a set of basic pots and pans. There wasn’t much actual food, but Nile had left coffee and tea from her previous visit, and she thought there might be a few odds and ends lurking in the freezer. And there was always the fruit shop down in the street.

Nicky walked through the entire apartment in a daze, never letting go of Joe’s hand. By the time he saw the main bedroom, silent tears were running down his face. Andy and Nile turned away politely so that Nicky could have a minute to cry on Joe’s shoulder. After Nicky had collected himself, he walked out of the bedroom and offered Nile a watery smile.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “How long can we stay here?”

This was the best part. “As long as you want,” Nile said. “I bought this place last year. I thought it might . . . I don’t know, make things a little better. If you want it, it’s yours.”

Nicky covered his mouth with his hand, and for a moment, Nile thought he was going to cry again.

“Safe houses are one thing,” she said, “but they’re not a home. You and Joe and Andy helped me to get my home all taken care of, and I’m so grateful. I know you miss your home, and this is as close as I could get. You can change the furniture, put pictures up. Make it yours.”

Nicky didn’t even try to speak. He wrapped his arms around Nile and held her for a long time, trembling just a little. Over Nicky’s shoulder, Nile saw that Joe was looking at her, a broad smile on his face, his eyes shining.

“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

“Thank you for being my family,” she said.

Eventually, Nicky released her and wiped his eyes. “Please, stay with us tonight,” he said. “A home should have guests to be truly welcoming.”

Nile picked up her and Andy’s overnight bags and let Nicky usher them to the guest room for a well-earned rest.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to everyone who has read and enjoyed this story! I have no idea how an idea that was about homesickness and longing for a place you can call your own and a place to belong ended up involving so much immortal high finance, but that’s writing for you. I suppose the connection is that money cannot buy happiness directly, but it can buy the things that give you life and physical and emotional security, and those can make you happy. And, of course, if you travel with Andromache the Scythian long enough, you might forget just how much emotional security a real home can give you. Fortunately, Nile is a smart cookie, and she is more than willing to learn from the experiences of others.


End file.
